protruded, and which of my childhood photographs belonged on which shelf. Mildewed stacks of Chinese newspapers dwelled in the corners, absorbing the polypropylene smell of the VHS tapes of Taiwanese soap operas that towered in the basement. I’d memorized the sounds and smells, the landscape scenes wrought in jade that my grandfather loved, and had helped care for the bonsai tree he kept. I slept comfortably, curled into the summer stickiness of the black leather sofa, until Gong stood at my feet, pointed at me, and spoke in the only language he had left.
那是誰?
Na shi shei?
“Who is that?”
Gong’s Alzheimer’s had made itself apparent to me, and I began to ask questions. The realization that the past was quickly dissolving gave an urgency to the task of knowing it. I had taken so much of my grandparents’ lives for granted, and language had been a barrier. I had stopped going to Saturday Chinese school when I was eight, dreading being the only half-Chinese kid in the classroom as we plowed through the three-hour span of calligraphy and folk songs, so my Mandarin dwindled and faded to its most basic. Our lives together took on a simplified form: my memories of Po and Gong are mostly of the food they cooked.
My father’s large family held a kind of gravitational pull. His parents moved from Wales to Canada when my older sister, Nika, and I were young, and with them I felt the warmth of a shared language, of cousins and distant relatives. But we didn’t have other family on my mother’s side—no aunties or great-grandmothers or cousins to call on. It had always been this way; I thought it was like that for many immigrant families, spread across the world as we were.
I knew that my grandparents had been born in China, but considered Taiwan home. I had a vague sense of why, though I’d visited the island only as an infant. I heard occasional mention of past wars and government leaders, of fighter jets and the ills of communism, but that history was not taught in Canadian schools. When people heard my family was from Taiwan, they would often reply, “Thailand? I love Thai food.” I learned to correct them, tactfully and smiling, never wanting to make my frustration known; but I realized, too, how little I knew myself.
To me, Po had simply always been my irascible, difficult grandmother. She squabbled with my mother and father and hardly talked to my grandfather, save in reproach. The energy she spent in spoiling Nika and me—buying us giant teddy bears and Toblerone and Ferrero Rocher chocolates—could shift quickly, and there were times when I kept my distance. She could wound with a word, and often would.
Gong had always been quiet, reading or caring for his plants in a solitary way during his time off from work as a janitor. When I was small, I would visit and watch him mop the floors of the Chef Boyardee canned-pasta factory. The brown-bricked building fascinated me, with its enormous steel machines and the pervasive smell of boiled starch and citrus cleaner. I would watch him clean, quiet as ever, and then beam with childish pride when he bought me a can of beef ravioli. I never questioned how his life had taken him there, long past retirement, dragging a hot mop across the floor of a Canadian factory.
I was twenty-seven when I went to Taiwan for the second time, my first visit since I was a baby. It was 2013. Gong had returned there and died a few years earlier, and my mother and I had gone to visit his remains. He had died alone, his memories wasted. It felt, to us, an irrevocable betrayal, though we’d had no say in what had happened and we couldn’t have changed it.
Decades had passed since my mother had emigrated. But the island had called my family back. My mother began to talk about returning for good when she retired. I saw the ways she had tried on a different life on a different continent, and how it bristled speaking a language she’d inherited, asking her children questions in Mandarin and receiving replies in English. We mocked her errors, as children do, and she would reply, “Well, you speak Chinese, then,” jokingly, though I sensed a loss in her tone. I saw in Taiwan something of the ways that places draw us in—and sometimes push us away again—and there grew in me an inarticulate longing.
My mother and I spent the better part of that visit wandering overgrown hills and trails outside the cities, in the hot and overgrown forests she had once known, where as a child she had roamed the green sprawl near her home, wandering wet through rice paddies on late afternoons, where she had memorized the plants that sprung vivid from every patch.
We ventured to the south, to Kenting, where she’d spent childhood holidays on the peninsula of coral. We soaked in northern rain in Yangmingshan, and delved into the mist that blanketed Taroko. Those first days in the cloud forest softened me to fog. In the mountains, I saw curtains of growth that clung to the cliffs, draping and enfolding every jagged bone of the mountainside. They petered out into clumps of withered brown stone where rock had not yet relented to root. But spiny trees grew from the holes left by erosion, and vines navigated the smoothed-down faces of the stone. The green was unceasing in its efforts.
It felt as if we were finding in the landscape an expression of this place and our lives beyond my grandfather’s death, beyond a past I did not fully understand. I developed a love for these mountains and their forests, a need to return and return again.
I lamented the years we’d stayed away. It wasn’t nostalgia—a dangerous thing, if it sees too narrowly—but still, other words could not account for it. Sehnsucht, from my adopted language, German—a yearning for another course, for things that could have been different—perhaps. Hiraeth, from Welsh—a homesickness for a past to which I could not return—came close. There is a Chinese word—鄉情 (xiangqing)—that means “longing for one’s native place.” But none of them quite fit. Unable to determine my feelings with words, I began to think, perhaps, that whatever force had stitched my grandparents and my mother to this place had caught me, with just a thread at first, and then bound me to it still stronger. My grief was displaced by deep affection. Does regret, by nature, transmute into longing?
I do not think it was a unique desire. I know others who have lost places or relatives, who have taken comfort in returning, as if exercising a muscle memory passed down through the generations. I found a constancy and a comfort in walking the island’s hills.
And where I couldn’t find words, I fell to other languages: to plants, to history, to landscape. My work as an environmental historian had taught me a great deal about temperate plants and navigating my way through a Canadian pine forest or a European heath with familiarity. In the vast and unrolling woodlands I grew up with in Canada, there is the red flame of autumn, the spare and silent retreat of winter. The pines and maples do their seasonal dance: pollen, senescence, bare branch.
But in Taiwan I found myself botanically adrift, as unsure of the trees as I was of the ferns that sprouted from windowsills. Taiwan’s plants are too many to name.
A green washes itself over Taiwan’s hillsides, a mottled, deep hue that reminds me more of lake than of land, of darkened waterweed more than tree. The green rolls out on the horizon, glinting with occasional light, but more often steaming with the low-hanging clouds that cling to the border between hillside and sky. That verdant hue is unlike any other I know.
Taiwan’s hills form a natural boundary between the cities and the mountains. Camphor laurels, peeling elms, charcoal trees, banyans, and sugar palms are overrun with the unfurling of ferns beyond number, with giant taros that stand gaping under heavy rain. The parasols of the eight-fingered Diplofatsia reach their hands to the sky. Their many greens stand layered, saturated, and deepened.
The island holds both migrant and endemic species. There are plants that came from the continent, carried by birds or other animals, by air or by the land bridge that once filled the Taiwan Strait when sea levels were lower, many ages ago. Some came from the island chain to the east—Japan—while others floated atop the southern seas, sprouting on the shores. There are newer plants that arose only here, a
